Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/589

Rh necessary light. In fact, though the statement may appear paradoxical, it is entirely because of its enormous actual temperature that the electric light seems so cool. It is this temperature that renders the proportion of luminous to non-luminous heat greater in the electric light than in our brightest flames. The electric light, moreover, requires no air to sustain it. It glows in the most perfect air-vacuum. Its light and heat are therefore not purchased at the expense of the vitalizing constituent of the atmosphere. It sheds its light without vitiating the air.

Two orders of minds have been implicated in the development of this subject: first, the investigator and discoverer, whose object is purely scientific, and who cares little for practical ends; secondly, the practical mechanician, whose object is mainly industrial. It would be easy, and probably in many cases true, to say that the one wants to gain knowledge, while the other wants to make money; but I am persuaded that the mechanician not unfrequently merges the hope of profit in the love of his work. Members of each of these classes are sometimes scornful toward those of the other. There is, for example, something superb in the disdain with which Cuvier hands over the discoveries of pure science to those who apply them: "Your grand practical achievements are only the easy application of truths not sought with a practical intent—truths which their discoverers pursued for their own sake, impelled solely by an ardor for knowledge. Those who turned them into practice could not have discovered them, while those who discovered them had neither the time nor the inclination to pursue them to a practical result. Your rising workshops, your peopled colonies, your vessels which furrow the seas; this abundance, this luxury, this tumult"—"this commotion," he would have added, were he now alive, "regarding the electric light"—"all come from discoverers in science, though all remain strange to them. The day that a discovery enters the market they abandon it; it concerns them no more."

In writing thus Cuvier probably did not sufficiently take into account the reaction of the applications of science upon science itself. The improvement of an old instrument or the invention of a new one is often tantamount to an enlargement and refinement of the senses of the scientific investigator. Beyond this, the amelioration of the community is also an object worthy of the best efforts of the human brain. Still, assuredly it is well and wise for a nation to bear in mind that those practical applications which strike the public eye, and excite public admiration, are the outgrowth of long-antecedent labors begun, continued, and ended under the operation of a purely intellectual stimulus. "Few," says Pasteur, "seem to comprehend the real origin of the marvels of industry and the wealth of nations. I need no other proof of this than the frequent employment in lectures, speeches, and official language of the erroneous expression, 'applied science.' A statesman